Oracle VP Ted Farrell recently spoke to SYS-CON in an exclusive recorded interview about the company's emerging AJAX strategy.

In a follow-up, he answered some questions about the company's JDeveloper Release 3, which supports AJAX..

He told us that Oracle 10g Release 3 has "lots of new features, including support for building Ajax applications, (including) There are many new features and functionality. For example, our new Java Server Faces support allows developers to build applications that target a wide variety of devices such as desktop, html in the web browsers, mobile devices, telnet devices, SMS and Ajax in the web browsers."

We noted that AJAX has gained a lot of traction recently, even though the technologies in it are hardly new, and wanted to know how developers can leverage JDeveloper 10g to develop apps with an AJAX approach. His response:

"Oracle's Ajax offering is unique from the others in the industry. While most Ajax toolkits force the developers to learn Javascript and DHTML to use them, Oracle abstracts the Ajax technologies into a JavaServer Faces (JSF) render kit offered as part of our Oracle ADF Faces components.

"What this means is that the developer just needs to program to the same JSP/JSF APIs they already know, and the Oracle Ajax render kit generates the JavaScript, DHTML, SVG and XMLHttpRequest syntax that is sent to and from the browser. The Oracle ADF Faces components provide pre-packaged, rich, data-aware components ready to be used by developers to build web pages."

We also noted that the spectrum of AJAX applications can run from fairly basic to very rich, so we asked him what sort of apps did he see developers creating with JDeveloper 10g. His response:

"Oracle JDevloper 10g provides wide spectrum of options to what can be built with the ADF technology. It is up to our customers to evaluate their current and new applications to see what can best take advantage of the Ajax technologies, and what are well suited for traditional HTML pages."